Top row, left to right: Temperance Aghamohammadi, Cristina Alexandra Pop, Zen Ren; bottom row, left to right: Nathan Curtis Roberts, Laura Schmitt, Tianyi.
It is with enormous pleasure that we announce the finalists for the eleventh annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers: Temperance Aghamohammadi, Cristina Alexandra Pop, Zen Ren, Nathan Curtis Roberts, Laura Schmitt, and Tianyi.
The New England Review Award for Emerging Writers provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August 2025 and is given annually to an emerging writer who offers an unusual and compelling new voice and who has been published by NER in the past year. The winner will be announced in March.
Congratulations to all six finalists! We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2024.
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. An Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Kenyon Review, ANMLY, swamp pink, Passages North, Annulet, and elsewhere. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.
Christina Alexandra Pop is an anthropologist whose research has been published in various academic outlets. More recently, Pop became interested in the multiple ways in which a tale comes to life and gains narrative momentum through creative writing. Pop’s first literary piece was published in Fugue, and another story came out in New England Review. Currently, Pop is working on completing a collection of short stories, tentatively titled “Detained and Other Tales: Ethnographic Fiction.” These “made-up true stories” reshuffle reality while remaining within the limits of what can be ethnographically documented. Writing in English as a non-native speaker and inspired, among others, by the works of Aleksandar Hemon, Chinua Achebe, and Yiyun Li, Pop seeks to give voice to the lived experiences of otherwise silent participants to history.
Zen Ren is a queer first-gen Chinese American writer based in Austin, Texas. They are a ’23 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, have won Nimrod’s ’23 New Writer Award for fiction, and have been recognized in Glimmer Train and New Letters contests. Their poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart. Aside from writing, they work in UX research and knit, sew, and surf skate. They are working on their first novel about a friendship and rivalry between two androids who meet in finishing school.
Nathan Curtis Roberts was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received honors from the Granum Foundation, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the American Society of Magazine Editors. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review and many other publications, some of them lost to time. He currently lives in Utah.
Laura Schmitt’s work can be found in the New England Review, The Pinch, Boulevard, Indiana Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the New England Review‘s 2021 Award for Emerging Writers and was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook. Laura was born in Southern California, has roots in Hawai’i and the Midwest, and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
Tianyi is a poet based in New York, from Hong Kong. His work can be found in Poetry Daily, New England Review, Small Orange Journal, The Margins, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is an alumnus of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program.